Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Is "Manning up" the answer?

"I don't think so," I thought as I read an email about Kay Hymowitz's new book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys. The book has a foreword by Christina Hoff Sommers, the author of Who Stole Feminism? so I am hoping that it gives men a fair shake--though given the title, I have to wonder [Oops, just found out I was confused by the literature I received. Christina Hoff Sommers did not write the introduction to the book--she is giving the introduction at a luncheon for the book]. Here is the description from Amazon.com:

In Manning Up, Manhattan Institute fellow and City Journal contributing editor Kay Hymowitz argues that the gains of the feminist revolution have had a dramatic, unanticipated effect on the current generation of young men. Traditional roles of family man and provider have been turned upside down as “pre-adult” men, stuck between adolescence and “real” adulthood, find themselves lost in a world where women make more money, are more educated, and are less likely to want to settle down and build a family. Their old scripts are gone, and young men find themselves adrift. Unlike women, they have no biological clock telling them it’s time to grow up. Hymowitz argues that it’s time for these young men to “man up.”

Okay, I haven't read the book--it just came out, but I am hoping that she is not blaming the problem on men and telling them to "man up" by giving women the marriage and family they want while putting themselves at risk. I am disturbed by one of the book blurbs by Richard Whitmire, author of "Why Boys Fail" who says:

“Kay Hymowitz does an exacting job describing the growing flock of man/children we're seeing, and she lays out the disturbing reality of the ‘marriageable mate’ dilemma that once affected only black women but has now become a broader phenomenon. Not only are there fewer college-educated men to marry, but many of those men who are available are little more than man/children—not anyone you would want your daughters to marry!”